Daily Archives: November 27, 2012

For an exhaustive analysis of what’s happening in the world of journalism, check out this report released today by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. I thought this paragraph, in the introduction, captured well the thrust of the lengthy report, and the dramatic changes still ongoing:

“If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models. The past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques, and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked the old clarity.”

Among the myriad reports, studies and surveys issued by the Pew Research Center, this one could easily be missed — though to its credit, the San Francisco Chronicle not only reported it in its “Tech Chronicles” blog, it also ran it in its print edition back in late September. Here’s the story: While Americans increasingly are getting their news online via cellphones, tablets or other mobile platforms — half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet, according to a Pew center survey – there has been a dramatic surge in the number of people getting their news from Facebook and other social media. Continue reading →

“The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”–Thomas Jefferson